You May Offend: The Proclaimers’ thirteenth lands

The Proclaimers released their thirteenth studio album, You May Offend, on 11 September 2026 through Cooking Vinyl. The twelve-track set was written in Edinburgh, recorded at Rockfield Studios with producer Dave Eringa and features the duo’s live band, alongside a guest turn from James Dean Bradfield of Manic Street Preachers.

The title track arrived as a single with a video. The album is out on CD, limited red and gold vinyl, cassette and digitally. Its subject matter centres on free speech, offence and cancellation — ground the Reid twins have also addressed in September interviews while discussing the record and the views that surround it.

From Leith to Rockfield again

Craig and Charlie Reid formed The Proclaimers in 1983. They first broke through with the 1987 single Letter from America, which reached No. 3 in the United Kingdom, and followed it with I’m Gonna Be in 1988, a song that topped the charts in Australia, Iceland and New Zealand. The accompanying album Sunshine on Leith, also from 1988, remains their biggest commercial statement: multi-platinum in Australia and Canada, more than two million copies worldwide, and around 700,000 in the United States. Across their catalogue the duo have sold over five million albums.

The run of studio records stretches from This Is the Story in 1987 through Hit the Highway in 1994, Like Comedy in 2012, Let’s Hear It for the Dogs in 2015, Angry Cyclist in 2018 and Dentures Out in 2022. You May Offend arrives four years after that set and returns them to Rockfield, a studio they have used before — including for the 2010 Rockfield Acoustic Session EP. Eringa’s production and Bradfield’s guitar place the new work in a straight rock frame rather than a purely acoustic one, with the live band on the tapes rather than a stripped-down duo.

That continuity matters for a duo whose reputation has always rested on direct songwriting and a stage presence built for rooms that still want choruses shouted back. The Edinburgh writing sessions and the Rockfield tracking keep the geography of their work familiar: Scottish songs cut in a Welsh studio that has long served British rock acts, topped by a Welsh guest guitarist.

The road still open

The album follows the start of their first tour for years. That run continues through December 2026, so the release is not a studio full stop but a record dropped into an active campaign. For an act whose catalogue is still defined for many listeners by the late-1980s singles and by Sunshine on Leith, a thirteenth album on Cooking Vinyl, with formats that include cassette as well as the limited vinyl colours, is a statement of ongoing working life rather than a heritage package.

Bradfield’s appearance links two catalogues that have rarely shared a bill in the public mind: the Manic Street Preachers’ Blackwood intensity and the Reids’ Leith directness. On a record explicitly concerned with offence and the right to speak, the collaboration is musical first — a guitar part on a finished album — and the rest is for listeners to weigh against the songs themselves.

What stands now is straightforward. You May Offend is out. The single has been in circulation since late June. The remaining tour dates run to the end of the year. After Dentures Out and a long gap between full tours, The Proclaimers have put a new studio album and a working road schedule on the table at the same time, and left the argument in the title where anyone can hear it.